Quickies: the End of the $100 Graphing Calculator; Finding Out Your Parent is a Conspiracy Theorist; and Nerdy Birthday Cards

Section 8 Vouchers Help The Poor — But Only If Housing Is Available – This article contrasts a poor, black, single mother who has a housing voucher but cannot find anyone to accept it within an hour-and-a-half of her job, with an upper-class, white, stay-at-home mother who is working to keep people with vouchers out of her neighborhood because she is worried about them “stereotyping” her or something. Wow.

“Motivated ignorance” is ruining our political discourse – “This is a key point that many people miss when discussing the ‘fake news’ or ‘filter bubble’ problem in our online media ecosystems. Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be genuinely unpleasant. And as long as this experience remains unpleasant, and easy to avoid, we’re just going to drift further and further apart.”

How I Discovered That My Dad Is a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorist – “I call my mother immediately afterward. And in a quick minute, I learn exactly what’s wrong with our country. ‘Ma, I just had the weirdest conversation with my father, you will not fucking believe it.’ And my mother, who votes every time, who organizes, who’s super-informed, has never even heard of Pizzagate. I fear that we have no chance of moving forward if my father can get that far down a rabbit hole my mother doesn’t even know exists.”

I’ve always questioned HUD’s competence. You should see some of the HUD homes on reservations. Some of them have no bathroom, just a toilet in the corner. (HUD did, thankfully, give those tracts a communal bathhouse, but there’s still…a toilet in the corner? Really? Like it’s prison or something?)

Now, the number of examples of “motivated ignorance” on Team Orange is fairly obvious, so I’ll focus on one from our side.

1. The Clintons, far from obsessed with winning the white Southern vote (There was a certain logic at the time: Outside of Hawaii, Western states were pretty monolithic for Ford in 1976, and that didn’t really change in the Reagan years.) and having belonged to a white-only country club, and Hillary’s own racially charged 2008 primary campaign, now had “deep historical ties to the black community”.
2. “Socially liberal, fiscally conservative” was now expected to be not only a thing for the first time in history and the wave of the future, instead of just a way of saying “I vote Republican 5 out of 6 times instead of 6 out of 7 times like those who hit the trifecta of Reagan’s three-legged stool; aren’t I so enlightened?” (For the record, the socially conservative, fiscally liberal crowd votes for Democrats 70% of the time.)
3. Lost your job in the 90s? Don’t blame the Clintons; blame Henry Ford for inventing the assembly line!
4. Apply “Southern strategy” logic to everywhere but the actual South, which still went solid R, but we can be absolutely sure they’re the future of the Democrats, and not just the past. (This one is still going on.)

These and many more are why I see myself as anti-Trump, but not quite ready to unify with the Democrats as a whole until they stop gaslighting.